Astronomy
Resources
We are a “Space Place” partner registered with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. This site has excellent educational content that is fun for kids of all ages. There is also information that teachers can use and print out for use in classrooms.
NASA’s award-winning Space Place website engages upper-elementary-aged children in space and Earth science through interactive games, hands-on activities, fun articles, and short videos. With material in both English and Spanish and numerous resources for parents and teachers, Space Place has something for everyone. Learn about everything from black holes and wild space weather to the reasons for seasons here on Earth. The Space Place has material on space, the Sun, the Solar System, our own planet, and the scientists and technology that make discovery possible.
NASA’s Climate Kids website brings the exciting science of climate change and sustainability to life. Targeting upper-elementary-aged children, the site is full of interactive games, hands-on activities, and engaging articles that make climate science accessible and fun. With a special section for educators, Climate Kids is great for parents and teachers as well. Find out how global changes affect our planet over time using the interactive Climate Time Machine. Follow the adventures of a quirky polar bear and monkey as they cope with climate change and humans in the animated feature “Climate Tales.” Learn about ways you can help the planet in the “green careers” section. Become a climate expert!
NOAA and NASA have joined forces to create the ultimate weather website. Targeting middle school students, SciJinks makes the science of weather fun and engaging with exciting and accessible content, games, and multimedia. Find answers to mysteries like our changing seasons, lightning, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other curious phenomenon with the site’s colorful “now I get it” pages. Learn about weather satellites by playing “Shields Up!” or “Satellite Insight!” There are videos, printable images and posters, and lots of other help for teachers. SciJinks also shows you its content by topic: clouds, tides, oceans, atmosphere, seasons, satellites—you name it.
This great web site will give you local times for the rising, setting and overhead passes of satellites, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, or any number of man-made objects and rockets. It has other great features like planet rise and set times. Once you click on the main page, set your observing location under the configuration header. Bookmark the following page which will include your location every time you check the website.
This site is a great place for getting a printed starmap of the evening sky. The maps are in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF) and are for the current month. An archive is available for previous maps.
The Southeastern Planetarium Association (SEPA)
The planetarium and its staff are members of this regional organization that encourages interaction between planetariums in the South-Eastern part of the country. If you are interested in getting more information about this organization, use the following link to visit their homepage.
Milligan College website. We house their 8″ refracting telescope in a special observatory dome here at Bays Mountain Park.
East Tennessee State University
This link has a public outreach tab that lists the public offerings that ETSU offers. It lists lectures that are going to be given by instructors, programming in their planetarium, dates on when they conduct star parties, and the like.
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